Dope-Darling: A Story of Cocaine

By David Garnett and Mint Editions

Dope-Darling is a story of sex, drugs, and music set just before the outbreak of the First World War.

Claire is the talk of the town when she meets Roy at a London nightclub. Leaving his fiancée Beatrice, Roy marries the bohemian starlet in only three weeks, entering a world of excess and excitement beyond his wildest dreams. As the cocaine and booze begin to wear him down, and as Britain prepares for war with Germany, he begins to wonder if enlistment could provide him a means of escape.

This edition of David Garnett’s Dope-Darling is a classic 1918 work of British literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mint Editions
• Release date: Aug 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781513212210

David Garnett

David Garnett (1892-1981) was a British writer. Born in Brighton, East Sussex, Garnett was the son of Edward Garnett, a critic and publisher, and Constance Clara Black, a translator of Russian known for bringing the works of Chekhov and Dostoevsky to an English audience. A pacifist, he spent the years of the First World War as a conscientious objector working on fruit farms along the eastern coast England. As a member of the Bloomsbury Group, he befriended many of the leading artists and intellectuals of his day. After publishing his debut novel, Dope Darling (1918), under a pseudonym, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Lady into Fox (1922), an allegorical fantasy novel. His 1955 novel Aspects of Love was adapted into a musical of the same name by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Alongside poet Francis Meynell, Garnett founded the Nonesuch Press, an independent publisher known for its editions of classic novels, poetry collections, and children’s books. Garnett, a bisexual man, had relationships with fellow Bloomsbury Group members Francis Birrell and Duncan Grant, and was married twice in his life. Following the death of his first wife Ray, with whom he had two sons, Grant married Angelica Bell, the daughter of Grant and Vanessa Bell, whose sister was renowned novelist Virginia Woolf. Together, the Garnetts raised four daughters, three of whom went on to careers in the arts. Following his divorce from Angelica, Garnett spent the rest of his life in Montcuq, France.

Book preview

I

Will you marry me? When Roy Gordon asked Beatrice Chase this question he was kneeling before her in a corn-field, where she sat on a pile of sheaves picking fragments of golden chaff from out the raven blackness of his hair.

She sat silent through a moment of happiness that was almost anguish; her fingers, still touching his curly head, trembled and closed mechanically. Looking down, she found his blue eyes fixed on her. Beatrice’s heart was too full for words; she could only smile and nod her acceptance. It seemed to her that she had never seen Roy looking so handsome. His shirt was open at the neck, his sleeves rolled up and his face red with working in the sun.

At that moment Roy was thinking the same about Beatrice; he had never seen her so calm, so beautiful.

At last Beatrice could find her voice and asked:

But are you sure you want me to?

I shouldn’t ask you if I didn’t, said Roy, and taking her hand in his he covered it with kisses. It was some time before he spoke again, to say: Darling, then we are engaged to be married. And plucking a straw out of the sheaf he began winding it round her finger. It made, when it was done, a band of pale gold.

Please regard this as an engagement ring—until we get a better one, he said, smiling.

How simple it seems to do what one wants to, when one has done it.

Beatrice leant forward and kissed him. She knew what Roy meant. They had known each other all their lives, and there had never been any sentiment or lovers’ talk between them. Yet they loved each other, only something had made it hard to speak, something that made the words of love seem unreal.

For a long time they sat there looking into each other’s eyes. It was the close of a perfect day, the second of Beatrice’s holiday after her final examination as a doctor, which she had pased with flying colours. They had risen early in the great house in the north of Scotland where they were staying with Roy’s cousins, and had gone for a ride together before breakfast. They had galloped up to the bare side of the moor where there was nothing but short heather and ling, and the mist still lay like white pools in the corries. Startled deer had sprung up half-a-mile away, and vanished as suddenly. Afterwards they had made their way slowly down the steep hillside through a forest of dark Scotch firs.

Their horses stumbled, and wood-pigeons rose with a great clatter of wings. After breakfast, Roy had seen the harvesters working, and had gone to help them on the spur of the moment. Beatrice had worked with him, tying sheaves, in the morning, but in the afternoon she had brought a book and sat looking on. She had felt happy as she had not done since she was a little girl in short frocks.

As their houses were next door to each other, Roy and Beatrice had always been like brother and sister. In those days of childhood Beatrice had been perfectly happy till Roy had been sent off to school at Rugby and afterwards to Cambridge, while she had gone to a boarding school and, like Roy, had afterwards become a medical student.

They walked back across the stubble in the last rays of the setting sun with their arms round each other. From the edge of the upland field they looked down on the rushing torrent that swept past a hundred feet below them and dashed itself from rock to rock in cascades of foam.

Beatrice suddenly felt Roy’s hand relax; he stood as if petrified, and she saw that he was looking at something. He seemed to have forgotten her existence, for when she spoke to him he started visibly and frowned before he spoke.

The osprey! he exclaimed, but did not point, and Beatrice began to feel annoyed with him.

Where? she asked; but at that moment the osprey rose from a tree below them, and mounting quickly on immense grey pointed wings flew rapidly towards the distant lake. Roy gazed after it spell-bound.

Beatrice felt suddenly unreasonably depressed. It seemed to her that what she had often felt before was still true, and that even if he did not think so, she was not the right person for Roy. She felt that though Roy loved her she did not charm him, or amuse him. She felt she was too dull, too heavy. When Roy spoke, his words added to her depression.

I shall never, never forget seeing that bird. I would rather have missed anything than that.

Something was wrong, yet Beatrice was in love with Roy herself. She knew Roy through and through, and believed he was her superior in everything that really mattered. She worshipped him blindly, as a woman does; but it was difficult to say she was not right. Roy Gordon had everything to make him loved by the women and envied by the men. Young, handsome, generous, he had no fault or flaw that could be detected. Indeed, his only fault was that he was too sensitive to other people’s feelings to care first and foremost about getting his own way. He was plucky enough if he were the person to suffer, but he could not bear to hurt other people. But this failure to push himself was only the reverse side of his good qualities, and, moreover, like his complete lack of fear, it was in his blood. The Gordons had never pushed themselves, because they had never needed to push themselves. Roy came of a noble house, and in an age when reckless courage was all that had been required of a gentleman, its sons had been the fairest amid the flowers of the Scotch nobility.

Nobody was surprised when Roy and Beatrice became engaged; they were such old friends that many people thought they had been engaged for years. And certainly nobody would have taken them for a newly engaged couple. The role of lovers sat ill upon them, though each had hidden fires and depths of passions that they did not guess at themselves.

For Beatrice the thought that she was to marry Roy was a deep source of happiness, but she did not dwell on it. Meantime there were examinations Roy had to pass, so she talked shop. They were to be married after he had qualified—in a year’s time.

II

When Roy came into her sitting-room at St. Xavier’s Hospital two days before his final examination, expecting a hard evening’s grind in preparation for it, Beatrice greeted him with a quick smile, and rather to his surprise kissed him.

We mustn’t overdo it, she said, you’ll pass easily now, I feel sure; if we go on you’ll get stale. Give me a kiss, and take me to the theatre.

Roy did as he was told, and in the brilliant restaurant where they dined, listening to the strains of a hidden band playing ragtime, Roy realised that he was staler than he had thought.

I’ve never worked so hard before in my life, he said; if I don’t pass now I never shall.

Beatrice laughed. I don’t suppose you ever have worked harder, or will ever have to work as hard again. I hope not. Now no more shop.

Do you realise I haven’t dined out for ever so long, not for months?

She nodded. She did realise it, and she knew that it was her doing that he had taken his work so seriously, and that when he passed brilliantly it would be a great deal due to her. If he passed this examination, as she felt sure he would, he would have taken the shortest time possible in which to qualify as a doctor. He had done brilliantly in the last year, and she had heard him spoken of as one of the most promising students that had ever been known in his hospital.

What’s that tune? Roy asked, as the band stopped playing. That’s new. He whistled it over, and, as